Anatomy of child starvation deaths
The shocking facts about the maladministration that led to the recent deaths of severely malnourished children in Raichur and Mysore districts of Karnataka. Fifty per cent of Karnataka’s 0-6 age-group suffers from various stages of malnutrition, with many on the verge of death
When they shoot our parents, can we remain in school?
The Orissa government has objected to children joining the anti-Posco agitations when they should be in school. Shouldn’t the government be more concerned about the 29,000 vacancies in primary schools and the fact that police forces have occupied many schools, asks P Sainath
Saving Baby Babu
About 250 newborns die every day in Bihar. But Bihar’s new Sick Newborn Care Units, which cater to over 90,000 infants every year, have helped bring the Infant Mortality Rate down from 56 per 1,000 births in 2008 to 52 per 1,000 in 2009, just 2 points above the national average
Children in the pits
Children as young as 10 are working in mines in Bellary district of Karnataka, recent studies and public hearings report. It is the children of displaced and homeless families who are exploited most by the mining mafia
Confining childhood in India
Do child rights activists need to step out of the boxes of ‘development’, ‘survival’, ‘protection’ and ‘participation’ into which they have confined India’s children? Do we need to interrogate child rights programming and the somewhat limiting notions of childhood around which it is built?
In the line of fire
Thousands of children from the Gothi Koya tribe in conflict-torn Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh have become the most tragic and innocent victims of the violence between the state and the insurgents. Rajashri Dasgupta travelled to Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh where the administration has set up residential schools for these orphans and refugees
Nipped in the bud
Child marriage still flourishes, as a recent public hearing revealed. How should the problem be dealt with? By making all marriages under the age of 18 for girls and 21 for boys invalid, instead of only those resulting from force or trafficking as at present? Or by public education the way 12 dalit women who bring out a monthly magazine in Andhra Pradesh called Navodayam do it?
No juvenile courts in J&K
Minors in Jammu & Kashmir are arrested under the stringent Public Safety Act for offences such as stone-pelting and incarcerated in jails together with adults. With neither a functioning Juvenile Justice Act nor juvenile courts for young offenders as in other parts of the country, these children emerge from jail traumatised and radicalised
A lost generation in Jammu's refugee camps
For 19 years, Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps in Jammu have seen no change in their poor living conditions. Riddled by disease, crammed into one-room tenements, and rendered unemployable by poor education and lack of employment opportunities, a whole generation has grown up angry, depressed and alienated
Leaving the salt pans to go to school
Children rescued from labour and given an education have seen a dramatic change in their lives. Usha Rai reports after hearing the rescued children speak at the recent National Convention on Right to Education and Abolition of Child Labour